The Silk Mill on Full Street has a strong claim to being England's first true factory, built from 1717 for John and Thomas Lombe using a water-powered throwing mill whose working design John Lombe had obtained by getting himself employed, under a false name, inside the Piedmontese silk industry in Italy. He smuggled detailed plans out hidden inside bales of raw silk bound for Derby, then built his mill on the strength of them. He did not enjoy his success for long: he died in 1722, not many years after the mill opened, and persistent rumour of the period held that he had been poisoned by an Italian agent sent in revenge for the theft, although this has never been proven and may simply be the kind of story that attaches itself to a sudden early death.
That unresolved death is the seed of the mill's ghost story: local tradition holds that Lombe's spirit still walks the corridors where the fruit of his espionage once spun day and night. A second and much bleaker tradition concerns the building's workforce rather than its owner. Children as young as seven worked shifts of up to fourteen hours in the mill, and one story, impossible now to verify against any surviving record, tells of a boy kicked down the stairs of the bell tower by an overseer who judged him to be working too slowly, and who died of his injuries at the foot of the stairs. His cries are said to still sound through the tower on occasion.
Neither story rests on documented sightings in the way some of Derby's pub hauntings do, and both should be read as the kind of oral tradition that naturally grows up around a building with a genuinely harsh working past. The mill itself has been substantially altered and expanded since Lombe's day and now operates as the Museum of Making, a public museum focused on the city's manufacturing history, so its haunted reputation today sits alongside, rather than instead of, its role as a heritage attraction.
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